Thursday, July 4, 2013
Game Of Thrones - A Dysfunctional Family Tree...
THE GLOBAL SEED VAULT
THE GLOBAL SEED VAULT
Svalbard Global Seed vault was established to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds in an underground cavern. It is an assurance to reduce of hunger & poverty due to the national disaster. Construction of the Seed Vault, which cost approximately 45 million Norwegian Kroner (9 million USD), was funded entirely by the Government of Norway. The seed bank is constructed 120 meters (390 ft) inside a sandstone mountain at Svalbard on Spitsbergen Island. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened officially on February 26, 2008. The first seeds arrived in January 2008. This vault can storage 4.5 million samples of different seeds in the dry temperature of 0° F (-18° C). This storage process can protect the seeds for the thousands of years. Svalbard Global Seed Vault ranked no.6 on Time's Best Inventions Of 2008.
Good audio about this from NPR here:
The Mystery Of The Piri Reis Map
The Piri Reis Map, which is a genuine document, not a hoax of any kind, was made at Constantinople in 1513 CE. It focuses on the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. Piri Reis could not have acquired his information on this latter region from contemporary explorers because Antarctica remained undiscovered until 1818 CE, more than 300 years after he drew the map. The ice-free coast of Queen Maud Land shown in the map is a colossal puzzle because the geological evidence confirms that the very latest date that it could have been surveyed and charted in an ice-free condition is 4000 BCE. It is not possible to pinpoint the earliest date that such a task could have been accomplished, but it seems that the Queen Maud Land littoral may have remained in a stable, unglaciated condition for at least 9,000 years before the spreading ice-cap swallowed it entirely. There is no civilization known to history that had the capacity or need to survey that coastline in the relevant period, i.e. between 13,000 BCE and 4000 BCE.In other words, the true enigma of this 1513 map is not so much its inclusion of a continent that was not discovered until 1818 but rather its portrayal of part of the coastline of that continent under ice-free conditions that came to an end 6,000 years ago and that have not since recurred.
How can this be explained? Piri Reis obligingly gives us the answer in a series of notes written in his own hand on the map itself. Here he tells us that he was not responsible for the original surveying and cartography. On the contrary he honestly admits that his role was merely that of compiler and copyist and that his own map was derived from a large number of source maps. Some of these had been drawn by contemporary or near-contemporary explorers (including Christopher Columbus), who had by then reached South America and the Caribbean, but others were documents of great antiquity dating back to the fourth century BCE or earlier.
Piri Reis did not venture any suggestion as to the identity of the cartographers who had produced the earlier maps. In 1963, however, Professor Charles. H. Hapgood proposed a novel and thought-provoking solution to the problem. Some of the source maps that the Admiral had made use of, he argued, in particular those said to date back to the fourth century BCE, had themselves been based on even older sources, which in turn had been based on sources more ancient still originating in the farthest antiquity. There was, he asserted, irrefutable evidence, that the earth had been comprehensively mapped before 4000 BCE by a hitherto unknown and undiscovered civilization that had achieved a high level of technological advancement:
"It appears" [he concluded] "that accurate information has been passed down from people to people. It appears that the charts must have ...
Hypocrite And Fraudster
The First Family was enjoying their three-nation, $100 million “working” vacation in Africa last week when the White House released a fact sheet on “U.S. Support for Strengthening Democratic Institutions, Rule of Law and Human Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
The first bullet point highlighted a priority in Kenya’s $53 million “Yes Youth Can” program, which “empowers nearly one million Kenyan youth to use their voices for advocacy in national and local policy-making.” One important component of the program is the “My ID, My Life” campaign that “helped 500,000 youth obtain national identification cards, a prerequisite to voter registration.”
Some of the money for that voter-ID program can no doubt be traced to U.S. foreign aid, a sign that the Obama administration endorses the common-sense need for voter-fraud prevention measures around the world. No one would expect this administration to endorse something it didn’t like.
It was a small step in the right direction in what turned out to be a very good week for voting reform. The U.S. Supreme Court took the Justice Department to task for failing to recognize that the country had changed in the half-century since the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965. In lifting the federal boot from the necks of the nine states and local jurisdictions in seven others, most but by no means all in the South, the court restored the freedom for these jurisdictions to adopt the same sort of voter-ID mechanisms that apparently work so well in Kenya. No further need to grovel before Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. for prior approval.
Texas was first in line to enhance Election Day security. The state’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, announced that the Texas voter-ID law — which Mr. Holder had gratuitously and inaccurately called a “poll tax” — would take effect immediately. Mr. Abbott says the high court decision cleared the way for Texas to resurrect its ID law and its redistricting map, drawn by the Republican legislative majority. Both the voter-ID law and the map had been in limbo since a federal court ruling in August.
“Texas may now implement the will of the people without being subject to outdated and unnecessary oversight and the overreach of federal power,” says Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.
Virginians could celebrate, too. Mr. Holder had been holding up the voter-ID law signed by Gov. Bob McDonnell in March. Virginia can now go to work implementing the changes ahead of the effective date of July 2014. The law provides, for example, that anyone who doesn’t have a Virginia driver’s license or identification card can get an ID card free of charge.
When a federal judge held up the Texas voting statute last year, the White House was well pleased. “This administration believes it should be easier for eligible citizens to vote, to register and vote,” said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman. “We should not be imposing unnecessary obstacles or barriers to voter participation.” And now Mr. Carney and his colleagues can take heart from the president’s latest “evolution.” If it’s good enough for Kenya, it’s good enough for the U.S.A.
The Washington Times
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/1/obamas-evolution-on-voter-id/#ixzz2Y2ZpfW9i
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